STC: 2010

martes, 24 de agosto de 2010

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) Articles and Interviews on SEO Topics

Posted: 23 Aug 2010 03:07 PM PDT

Published: August 15, 2010

Ken McGaffin is Chief Marketing Officer at Wordtracker. He is an experienced Internet marketing consultant and has worked for major pharmaceutical companies, advertising agencies, government bodies and non-profit organizations.

Wordtracker recently announced their new link building tool, Word Tracker Link Builder. This tool is based on the Majestic SEO link database.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Could you tell me a bit about the nature of how you've worked with Majestic?

Ken McGaffin: We've worked very closely with Majestic for the last two years. They have been providing us with specific keyword information, which really adds value to the metrics we are able to do. Because they also have tremendous backlink information, we have been looking at ways to also utilize that. Link analysis is brilliant because, when used the right way, there are absolutely fantastic things to find out and understand.

People ultimately want to build links so when we were thinking about this tool, our thought was to work very closely with Majestic, take their information via an API, and build a tool around that information. Ideally, the tool would not only analyze inbound links, but would also help people through the process of link building, which is where we see ourselves adding value. It's not simply taking the API from Majestic and labeling it. Our goal is to offers real value in terms of people researching, and implementing link campaigns.

Eric Enge: It looks like you have some interesting innovations on the surface such as the utility to look for URLs that rank for a given keyword. Does that feature go beyond the Majestic data and actually use search engine APIs?

Ken McGaffin: That is correct, but it is just one innovation. There are other ways to enhance that, which is what we are planning right now. Link analysis can tell people so much about what they really need to understand and what they should be analyzing. A lot of people stop the process once they find their competition, but first and foremost, even though it might be boring, they need to analyze who is linking to them now and learn from that. That's a step that people rush over.

The people who are linking to a site are doing so for a reason which needs to be understood. Analysis also needs to delve into what the links tell them about their market, what relationships they can build with those people, and then very importantly how those people can help them find more link prospects.

Looking at who is linking to their site is a good benchmark, but all of those sites are in their direct market place. By going further and doing a link analysis of all the sites that are linking to those sites, a bigger picture of the market place or the community around that topic can be created. Also, deducing who the first level of linking sites are linking to is another part of the jigsaw puzzle.

In the end, our tool goes beyond link analysis, and is a way to find out what competitors are doing. It provides an understanding of the online community in which a business exists which is much more important.

Eric Enge: I agree, I have actually argued in columns in both Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch that the main reason to do competitive link analysis is to get ideas for campaigns. It is certainly possible to contact some of those people and request links, but by looking deeper it is possible to also learn about the market, and it is that knowledge that really empowers the most interesting possibilities of link building .

Ken McGaffin: Absolutely. In doing this deeper analysis, someone might find that they are under-represented in a particular sector. By doing a comprehensive analysis, they might see that the non-profit community, who could make use of their tools, is under-represented because they have no links, which therefore suggests that a targeted link campaign to the non-profit community could be beneficial.

It's really an understanding of the market place. When doing link analysis, there are four areas that are most important. First is self-analysis which is incredibly productive and something that people overlook. Second is analyzing competitors focusing not on what they are doing, but rather on why they are doing it, and using that to become better than them.

The third important thing is to analyze who is linking to authoritative blogs and news site. That is tremendous information because blogs and news sites tend to interlink and reference other people's articles. Analyzing a non-competing news site in the marketplace is a way to find a huge number of linkup opportunities.

The fourth one is really interesting. Great information can be obtained by looking for old news stories in the target marketplace and analyzing who picked them up and what bloggers wrote about them. The example I use when teaching is a supermarket in the UK who did a great PR story on ugly fruit. The real story was that ugly fruit, which doesn't look as good as supermarkets want it to, is nonetheless absolutely fresh, gorgeous, high-quality fruit. They offered it at a 20% discount and called it ugly fruit. That was great story, but a search on Google for "ugly fruit" returns a bunch of websites writing about organic food, quality food, grainy food, supermarkets or food habits. It's a really pleasant way to find a new site that perhaps competitors haven't even thought about. The basis of link building, and searching for potential link prospects is broadening the horizons beyond the competitors. To sum that up, it is thinking about the marketplace, not about the competitor.

Eric Enge: I couldn't agree more. Having played with the tool, I like the ability to list a number of domains at once and pull the data almost instantly for all of those domains. It's nice to simply enter a bunch of domains, and get a list of results with how many links are to each one, and to also be able to click for the details. The other feature that struck me is the ability to show links that contain or do not contain certain constraints, which enables further filtering and allows more data to be pulled out of the system.

Ken McGaffin: It gives insight into a competitor's strategy. A very good example is PETCO.com, the big online pet foods retailer. An analysis of them, filtered for dot org, shows that they have a great number of links from smaller organizations involved in animal welfare. They have created a community involvement campaign that supports these groups and in return PETCO gets a ton of links coming back. This is the type of valuable information that the tool can isolate.

It is also interesting to filter the results on simple word news which returns news articles which are helpful in finding news websites. Doing a search on just the single word blog is also interesting. It won't pick up all the blogs, but it picks up the ones with a blog in the URL which is a great starting point. I did a fountain pen website, and analyzed the top four brands. Within three minutes, I identified over 600 blogs that have written a byte and linked to fountain pen websites. In a short period of time I had a large number of prospects that the tool then ranked, which is a tremendous help. Anybody who has done link building knows how hard and time intensive the work is which is why anything that saves time and direct efforts to the strongest prospects is really worthwhile.

Eric Enge: Is there a way to extract this data into a spreadsheet?

Ken McGaffin: Funny you should ask. We are working on that as we speak and it should be deployed imminently.

Eric Enge: Is there a plan to be able to extract all the data rather than the first 2,000?

Ken McGaffin: Yes, that is a potential function as well. It's not one of our priorities at the moment, but it's on the list of things that we want to do.

Eric Enge: Can you tell me about the ideas that are priorities at the moment?

Ken McGaffin: We want to help people be creative when thinking about their targets. At the moment, the additional feature that we are providing involves searching on a keyword. The idea is to enter a keyword and isolate the blogs or news sites that are appropriate to that keyword.

Eric Enge: So it basically gives an analysis of the total link space, and then it is filters by the chosen criteria whether that is blogs or a news site?

Ken McGaffin: Yes. Rather than going through all the results if the goal is to create a blog campaign, with one click, it gives all the blogs relating to outdoor clothing or whatever the interest is. It shortens the process. Another interesting resource is lists which the Internet is full of, whether it's the top 100 cycling blogs, the top ten outdoor clothing blogs or the top 50 travel blogs. These are incredibly important for two reasons. First, the sites that publish these lists are obvious link targets. Second, the featured blogs are obvious targets as well, because they are the top blogs in the area or have been defined as such.

There are lots of clever things that experienced link builders can do that we want to make available to those who are not as experienced in link building, or perhaps not as creative as they could be. The idea is if people want to create links, they can use our tool and quickly generate a ton of ideas. In turn, that means we have to add a level of thinking to the results that come from Majestic SEO. In terms of building this tool, the possibilities are almost limitless with the data from Majestic.

Eric Enge: The whole strategy is to help people better qualify and categorize. When conducting a link building campaign, typically more experienced link builders think about the segments they can go after. Being able to breakdown and classify data enables someone to more readily pull information out and embed it into categories of campaigns such as a blog campaign. Categorization would be a nice tool.

Ken McGaffin: Yes. Categorization is really useful. We've also created an ability within the tool to assist with optimizing campaigns. This feature allows the user to look at sites of interest and make notes about whether they liked the site, if it accepts articles, or to make a note to remember to send them an email, or an article. The user can also flag prospects as having been contacted and when to contact them again.

We not only want to help people create a campaign, but we want to help annotate that campaign and organize it because people are forgetful and have bad work habits. We are trying to make it easier to have really good work habits because then people will get more out of their time.

The next priority is to monitor changes, so for instance if a new link appears, an email would come saying there are ten new links to you this week. We are starting work on that later this month. You probably heard from Dickson and Alex that they are going to be updating their database weekly which will make a monitoring service even more valuable.

Eric Enge: Another good idea would be to rate a website's propensity for providing external links. It requires some thought on how, but one way is to look for number of pages on a site, and the number of external links they've given. If they have a 1,000-page site and two external links, it's probably not a good target.

Ken McGaffin: That feature is on our list as well. A website that has a propensity to link out has a different link footprint than a website that does not. The ability to analyze the link footprint, or the links going in and coming out of a particular site, is what allows someone to determine whether a site is well-linked and therefore whether it is a good target.

Eric Enge: Another interesting thought is the notion of implementing the Microsoft part of link to link from domain feature. So, you enter a name of a website and get a list of the types of links to such as a little extension of what we were just talking about. Are the other tools you are considering as extensions to this tool or in fact separate products coming out in the future?

Ken McGaffin: The answer is both. We have a lot of ideas for extensions and some that are new. I forgot to mention that at the moment it isn't possible to see the linking text from the links that we show, so that will be the next feature to go live which should happen before the end of this month.

To answer your question, there are separate tools we are considering in Wordtracker. The vision is to create a Wordtracker suite of tools, and the rationale is pretty simple. We have been known as a keyword research company because we have been doing it for 12 years, however keyword research is only part of the picture. It is important to know what the best keywords are, but it's also important to use those in the right way.

While Link builder takes the keywords we have been looking at and emphasizing the importance of off-page optimization, Wordtracker focuses on on-the-page optimization. It's a very natural jump for us to go into link building. Anchor text is also very important when link building.

The other tool that has just gone live and is available on the website is Strategizer. It works with Google Analytics to show what keywords are converting for a site at the moment, and what the keyword niche around those successful keywords is. This information makes it possible to greatly expand upon what a single keyword can offer. For instance, let's say management strategy is a keyword that someone feels could bring them lots of business. A keyword niche is all the keywords that include the words management strategy. Using this tool, if someone was successful for the keyword management strategy then it would be easy for them to also be successful for the keyword niche around management strategy.

That tool is live in test load at the moment, and we are putting the final touches on it over the next two weeks when we should be officially issuing it. The results are pretty fantastic at the moment; it's a really exciting tool.

The big change is that we are moving from keyword research to the actual performance of keywords on a website. It's not an opinion or a count; it's actually what's happening on a person's website. When that is discovered, then we can help them expand upon that to become more competitive.

The final project in development at the moment is in the area of PPC, which is another new area for us as we've been seen as primarily an SEO tool in the past. For this and all the ideas in development, it's about the excitement of getting people to use keywords in a creative and effective way.

Eric Enge: You could also leverage what you have in hand. The relationship between anchor text density and keyword volume is interesting. With the phrase management tools, you can look at the keyword volume, but you can also see how many times it appears in anchor text across the web.

Ken McGaffin: Absolutely. Our keyword tool already can do that, but incorporating that into other tools is quite interesting. There are certainly crossovers between all of the tools which is why integrating them is a very important task on our development plan right now.

Eric Enge: Of course you have a number of customers that use the keyword research tool. From Majestic's point of view, it seems you are a channel for them because of the people who want to use your tool because they are familiar and comfortable with the other tools you've provided. That customer base should provide synergies for the business and help things get moving for you quite quickly.

Ken McGaffin: Yes. They really are good bunch of people to work with, and we've had a very good relationship. We are both confident that will continue.

Eric Enge: Thanks Ken!

Ken McGaffin: Thank You Eric!

Have comments or want to discuss? You can comment on the Ken McGaffin interview here.

Other Recent Interviews

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com

martes, 29 de junio de 2010

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) Articles and Interviews on SEO Topics

Mikko Ollila Interviewed by Eric Enge

Posted: 28 Jun 2010 07:00 AM PDT

Published: June 27, 2010

Mikko Ollila is a senior product manager working on Bing Local. He is responsible for defining the value proposition and driving the business strategy for Local Search. Ollila first started working at Microsoft Corp. in 2006 with Microsoft Dynamics as a product manager overseeing supply chain ERP offerings. He joined Bing in 2007, where he became responsible for product management, planning, research and value proposition development, first for toolbar products and then Bing local search.

Before working at Microsoft, Ollila spent five years working as a software consultant and product manager at Manhattan Associates - a supply chain software company based in Atlanta. He graduated from the Clarkson University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Finance and a Master of Science degree in Management Information Systems. He later received an MBA from Yale School of Management. Outside work, Ollila enjoys good coffee, skiing and HBO.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Can you tell us what you do at Bing?

Mikko Ollila: I work in Bing product management, and I focus on local search. What that means is whenever someone does a search for something where geographic location or orientation is important, the experience that ensues is my responsibility.

To give an example, if someone searches for Sushi in Seattle, the ensuing experience at Bing is locally-oriented, and that's where my work and my group's work are focused. Functionally, I work in the marketing organization, so we look at both the business of local search as well as the product that produces those business results. We are involved in product planning and the overall local business for Bing.

Eric Enge: Does that responsibility for local search extend outside the Maps product?

Mikko Ollila: Much of local searching is done on the search engine itself and is expressed on the search results page in the form of an instant answer. How we display local instant answers, what they look like, and what they point to is the focus of what I do. We typically think of those as entry points into the more immersive mapping experience.

Eric Enge: Assuming the user hasn't found their answer yet, are these entry points a strong drive to bring them into the local interface itself?

Mikko Ollila: Local is interesting in that way because we do a great job on search. We don't send that much traffic to our mapping experience. We try to balance the search experience and the mapping experience, in favor of the consumers. Our aim is to only send requests that make sense to our mapping site; otherwise we try to answer the query through the search results page. It's a balancing act.

Eric Enge: Could you give an overview of what Silverlight is and the benefits of using it, especially as it relates to local search?

Mikko Ollila: Silverlight is a visually-oriented web application framework from Microsoft. It allows developers to easily create sophisticated visual experiences, much like Flash does. Silverlight allows websites and web developers to create something beautiful instead of the more traditional HTML look and feel of pages loading.

A lot of local experiences on the web have videos, imagery, reviews, and maps stitched together in a choppy way. Users are looking for a way to weave all of those valuable elements together into a cohesive flow and that is the aim of Silverlight.

If they are looking for a restaurant, and want to find a theatre next to that restaurant, the goal of this visual technology is to create an experience where they can walk around as if they were there. In a visually appealing way, they can explore a neighborhood, and find points of interest they want to visit.

Eric Enge: Do you have an example of a search that highlights this?

Mikko Ollila: My favorite search is Six Arms in Seattle. To see what I am talking about though, make sure you have Silverlight enabled. You can do this by going to http://maps.bing.com and searching on "Six Arms in Seattle". Notice over on the left is a link labeled "Streetside", and click on that.

We also highlight what is nearby really well in Bing Maps, and Silverlight allows a person to dive into a place of interest and use the Streetsideimagery to experience it as if they were walking on the street. The imagery and the Streetside experience are powered by Silverlight and show where all the points of interests are. If I was going on a date, and wanted to know where I was going, I could take a quick cruise through with Bing Maps, open neighborhood, and run a sequence of events before actually doing it. So, my evening goes that much smoother.

Once the search term is chosen, Bing creates a picture of a 3D World. Then it zooms in to show actual imagery of that world to allow easy navigation of neighborhoods.

Eric Enge: I can see 300 East Pike Street.

Mikko Ollila: Click on the Map Apps button on the lower left. Then click on "What's Nearby":

Click on that and we will show a list of what's nearby. Once what's nearby is established, it paints those points of interests on a map.

Eric Enge: Yes, I see Victrola Coffee.

Mikko Ollila: Clicking on Victrola Coffee brings up a tag with a link to Streetside. This tag powers the transition from the aerial view into the actual Streetside experience. Now you are standing next to Victrola Coffee and you can cruise around. Look to the left, and Six Arms is right there. If the intention was to first go to Victrola Coffee, and then hit Six Arms, you could cruise through the neighborhood and see what it looks like.

I am not under the illusion that our competitors don't have similar technology, but if we do our job right, the technology we have definitely allows us to do a better job, with smoother more universal experiences than our competitors.

Eric Enge: Any other aspects of Silverlight you want to call out?

Mikko Ollila: Map Apps are a way for developers to easily and relatively quickly create stunning, experiences on top of our maps with the help of Silverlight.

Eric Enge: What about other key differentiators? Could you expand on Streetside's geographic coverage?

Mikko Ollila: The idea is ultimately to have a virtual tour of the world. Today we cover most large metro areas where this technology and imagery is the most useful. We are expanding that coverage as we go and we have a map of our coverage at Bing Maps; all the blue areas are where our coverage is for Streetside Imagery.

Eric Enge: Do you see this being used extensively on mobile devices?

Mikko Ollila: It probably has more value on a PC right now because in a mobile situation, the person may already be looking at something in real life.

There is a whole other notion of what is called alternate reality or augmented-reality. Blaise Aguera y Arcas gave a demo at the Bing TED Conference of how to overlay experiences like this on a mobile device. It is possible to view a street through a mobile and have this technology recognize the location. It might overlay information from a different view into the scene it is presented with.

Eric Enge: Let's talk about other differentiators. Since we've been talking about mobile, so why don't we expand upon that?

Mikko Ollila: Mobile searching and local searching are tied at the head. The Kelsey group quotes that in the foreseeable future more local searches will be carried out from mobile phones than from PC's.

From that perspective we recognize and believe that mobile is going to play an increasingly large role in the local search. Although most of the underlying data draws on the same sources whether searching from a mobile or PC, it's important to consider the context of mobile when delivering local searches. Whether it's a telephone number or restaurants on a map, it's the same dataset on a PC or a mobile, but the experience itself may be different, so we have a mobile app which is available on Windows Phone, iPhone and iTouch, Blackberry and Sidekick devices . That's the main mobile Bing Local experience that we have.

Eric Enge: Can you give some examples of what you are doing that is different?

Mikko Ollila: Right now the focus with the Bing Mobile App is mostly on usability, and the general look and feel of the experience optimized for each device. We recently rolled out new social features for the iPhone app that's unique to the Bing app. Now you can connect to and access your Facebook and Twitter accounts and see combined status updates from your friends from within the Bing app. What's better is that when you search using the app, you'll now see web results along with relevant results from your social network. So if you search for a movie, you'll see movie showtimes first, then anything your friends may have said about it next. This is also handy for local businesses or products where you want to see what your network is saying before deciding what business to visit. Last, when you find something you like using the app, you can easily share it with your network on Facebook, Twitter, or through email.

Right now it's a race to create more natural, more intuitive, and more powerful mobile applications that take into consideration the context of the searcher, and generate the right experience based on that context and we've made a good start with these updates to the iPhone app.

Eric Enge: Do you foresee using location information extracted from mobile devices to automatically orient people to where they are?

Mikko Ollila: Exactly. The signal from a mobile device is a lot more precise than it is on a PC.

Eric Enge: If somebody is on Streetside and isn't sure where they are and they take a picture of something, could Streetside orient them and provide directions?

Mikko Ollila: In the future - yes, or better yet, if they look down that street through their mobile device, Streetside could show that street and paint into that mobile screen the chosen points of interest. If they are looking for a bathroom, it would tell them exactly where the bathroom is-- walk this way for 50 yards then turn right and you'll find a bathroom.

That's the level we are talking about in the future, and as far as mobile experiences go, it's a race to get there and produce differentiator experiences.

Eric Enge: Even though iPhones and other Smartphones have greatly reduced the issues with smaller form factors, there are still smaller phone factor issues.

Mikko Ollila: The challenging part of mobile is to account for the form factor issues. Because we are a search engine, we have to handle a variety of formats. These issues will continue challenge anyone who participates in this industry.

Eric Enge: There are several smaller but nonetheless quite interesting features like parking finder and gas prices mapping applications; could you talk about those?

Mikko Ollila: Those are examples of Bing Map Apps, which are being developed because people want to physically or geographically orient themselves to certain places or things of interest. For instance, a bird enthusiast on a business trip may want to know how far the bird sanctuaries are in case they want to sneak out of a conference one afternoon. A bathroom is another example. These two answers are deliberate because the bird example is something that relatively few people would care about, and the later example is something that most or all people would care about.

As a consumer product, we want Bing to account for what most people care about, but we also don't want to ignore certain niche groups of people. Both groups should be able to build experiences they care about.

The Bing Maps applications are a way for people to easily create spatially-oriented experiences around what they are passionate about. If there is a technology inclined developer who is also a birder, with the help of the Bing Maps platform , they can easily create a bird watching mapping application on Bing to delineate where the bird sanctuaries are and other information about bird watching.

Instead of us having to think about all the cool things out there that people might see on a map, we basically give the technology away for people to enable themselves and enable people like themselves to create those experiences. A parking app would be useful for most people and there is a good chance that applications such as those will become part of the core product. We'll continue to push the envelope and give more and more people mapping applications that are relevant so they can find all those things that they care about near and around them.

Eric Enge: Do you develop a lot of these Map Apps yourselves?

Mikko Ollila: We have developed some ourselves and we have partners that have developed others. We recently opened up the Map app experience to enable anyone to develop these map apps with the release of the Bing Map App SDK, announced last month.

Eric Enge: If someone wants to develop a Map App, do they have to apply or is there a process they go through?

Mikko Ollila: Yes - at TechEd last month, we announced the availability of the Bing Map App SDK, and developers can now download the SDK and start building, testing and submitting applications to Bing Maps.

Eric Enge: Do you have a partnership strategy?

Mikko Ollila: There are several considerations when partnering in local search. One is availability of data. There is no easy way to figure out everything that's out there in the world -- stores, points of interest, parks, rivers. There are a lot of business partners scouring the earth and collecting this data who then work with us to surface it on a map or in Bing Local. For instance, our basic partnership is with InfoUSA.

Eric Enge: They make 30,000,000 phone calls a year and validate that data through an intensive review process.

Mikko Ollila: As a technology company we would like to automate as much as possible. The ideal would be to somehow crawl the physical earth like we crawl the web, but today that's not possible. Today, we partner with InfoUSA, who makes millions of phone calls a year to get their data.

Eric Enge: Are you also drawing data from other aggregating sources like Localeze and Acxiom?

Mikko Ollila: Since no data source is perfect, and we would like to get as close to perfect as possible, we draw on several sources, and then we scrub, validate, improve, fill in gaps, and try to make the data as perfect as possible with as much confidence as possible. If the same business entity from five different sources looks exactly the same, that's a pretty good guess that it's right. If another business entity is missing data or has conflicting data then it's our job to resolve the conflicts, fill in the gaps, and ultimately show what we feel is the best estimate or best manifestation of that business perspective.

Eric Enge: I would imagine if a business has conflicting locations, your confidence in the data being accurate goes down, because ultimately you don't want to send someone an address and have them find that what they are looking for is not there.

Mikko Ollila: That's exactly right. While we could play the blame game, and say it's not our fault that we got wrong data from a partner, we don't have that luxury - it is our fault, and it is our responsibility. If someone got information from Bing and it was wrong then it's our responsibility.

It's very important from a consumer experience perspective that our data is right. In local search, this is a key competitive battlefield. The best way to disappoint and really anger a consumer is to show them inaccurate local data. The accuracy, freshness, and coverage of local data are extremely important.

As the data expands into verticals such as healthcare, or doctors, that's where generic data providers might not have great coverage. In considering how to get more in-depth and better coverage in a particular vertical like doctors or restaurants, we start thinking about partnering with expert data providers to get information on specific verticals.

Eric Enge: I've been advising people for a long time that in local search they need to make the investment to have their data consistent on the web. This has a big impact on their ability to rank for local search. If there are four businesses which have consistent addresses and two that don't, the search engine is only going to show the four because the person is going to find the store there.

Mikko Ollila: Bing shows the top five results on the search result page, Google shows seven. Using restaurants in San Francisco as an example, the goal is to make sure that the top five or seven restaurants that surface have high confidence and quality of data. If data surfaces where the phone number is wrong it's the search engines responsibility. Consequently a restaurant or any business that is worried about appearing in the Google 7 Pack or the Bing 5 Pack, should make sure that the consistency of their data is their first priority.

Eric Enge: Can you talk about what you are doing with Facebook?

Mikko Ollila: Microsoft and Facebook work on a lot together including Bing powered search on Facebook. Partners like Facebook and foursquare who have access to social updates and what people are saying and doing in the physical world are of interest to local search because we are always looking for what interests people.

For instance, in the case of foursquare, if a restaurant starts to get a significant number of check-ins, we interpret that as a signal of something going on with that particular business. Looking further and interpreting that data, our goal would be to create a user experience that highlights that in a certain way. Today there is a Bing Map App that shows all the businesses with foursquare check-ins.

That's one expression of what we can do with it. As a larger rule, the social network and social networking activity today serves as a signal of what is going on and a lot of the things that would otherwise difficult for us to scour and figure out, are expressed nicely in those social networks.

It tends to reason that reviews are very important. People like to review things today on places like Yelp and CitySearch. Our goal is to figure out where we get most of these reviews and show them on the search engine.

As online social networking becomes more commerce-oriented, people are starting to rely on reviews, not only from strangers, but from their friends and family. When such content starts to appear on the web in reasonable quantity, that becomes of tremendous interest to us in terms of showing our users how certain businesses are currently being reviewed and being interpreted by other users, including people they might know.

Eric Enge: Thanks Mikko!

Mikko Ollila: My pleasure Eric.

Have comments or want to discuss? You can comment on the Mikko Ollila interview here.

Other Recent Interviews

Shashi Seth on the Future of Yahoo! Search

Posted: 20 Jun 2010 02:36 AM PDT

Published: June 20, 2010

Shashi Seth is the Senior VP of Yahoo! Search Products. In this role he oversees the future strategy of search at Yahoo! Prior to Yahoo!, he worked as the Sr. VP, Global Ad Products at AOL Time Warner. Prior to AOL he was the Chief Revenue Officer at Cooliris, and before that headed up the efforts to monetize YouTube.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Can you tell us a bit about where things are with the Yahoo! - Bing transaction?

Shashi Seth: Since the Microsoft transition approval was announced this February, we have been busy working on the integration. And, that project is well underway with lots of internal testing going on as we speak, and we have been testing their index and ranking in our environment for a couple of weeks now. Things are looking good, and our goal is to be able to complete the migration sometime before the holidays.

Eric Enge: From what I've seen it looks like a phased rollout.

Shashi Seth: It is being done in two phases. Our first priority is to make sure that the algorithmic side transitions over with quality. We have a set of metrics in place with Microsoft to assess what it takes to migrate over a certain country and what the quality measures are.

The testing that has begun looks at those metrics carefully to tweak the different elements and parameters. Once we are comfortable on both sides, we will pull the trigger and do the transition. Soon after that we would do the same for the sponsored search side. These efforts are happening in parallel with two separate dedicated teams for each effort. They are working hard on the task at hand, but the goal was not to push them exactly together so that everything happens in one day because that would become a very big task. Our aim is to accomplish all this before the holiday season.

Eric Enge: After the transition, if someone does an arbitrary query in Bing and the same query in Yahoo, would the search results, in principle, be identical, or are you doing some fine tuning to make them different?

Shashi Seth: The index and ranking coverage are going to be identical. What we left open in the deal terms was what Yahoo can and cannot do with both the algorithmic and the sponsored side. Yahoo has the flexibility not only to utilize data sources from places like Twitter or our own properties, but we can also build what we call shortcuts, and other elements, and trigger them for appropriate search terms.

We have a lot of room to develop unique user experiences on Yahoo. For some sets of queries, especially the long tail of queries, there will be identical results for Bing and Yahoo, nevertheless with completely different treatments. For information with vertical intent like local or shopping, we are going to not only bring our proprietary Yahoo content to show on the search results page, but also pursuing a different and separate strategy that aims to help people get an answer quickly without wading through the blue links. That requires a lot of data in our "look aside" indexes; which we call the "web of things". That means we source data, we extract and enrich it, and we use it to give deep insights to users for whatever they are looking for.

50% of all queries are going to receive experiences like that, but the other 50% will remain long tail and will not even trigger an ad or a shortcut. The benefit of this relationship with Microsoft is that Yahoo gets to focus on the front-end of search, look at other data sources and explore different paths, while Microsoft does the heavy lifting on the backend side.

Eric Enge: It gives Yahoo time to develop a position on what will be the higher value ad aspects of a search experience in the future.

Shashi Seth: Exactly. Essentially the backend is rapidly becoming a commodity, and we don't need to be in that business. The analogy is if we were in the car business, we've outsourced the engine and are going to focus on the entire user experience for the car. Part of that strategy is determining how to win in this space, and part of the strategy is taking advantage of the fact that we have 600 million users worldwide.

In many countries and regions, such as the US, we have 80% to 85% penetration of the internet population. We have 170 million users in the US and a subset of roughly 80 million of those users use Yahoo to search. That means there are 90 million users just in the US that we can go after who are spending a considerable amount of time on Yahoo properties.

The goal is to get in front of them with compelling experiences that help their browsing and content discovery, turn them into searches, bring them over to the search results page, give them a great experience and over time turn them into active and engaged Yahoo searchers.

Eric Enge: You could say that this deal had nothing to do with Yahoo exiting the search business, but actually repositioning itself in a stronger leadership role.

Shashi Seth: That's exactly what we are saying. We believe the user base is changing significantly. Where people are spending their time, how they are discovering content and the content they are engaging with is changing so rapidly that search needs to evolve with it. Instead of waiting for users to come to a search results page to enter a query, we need to be proactive in fulfilling their content discovery needs.

The biggest problem is all searchers have limited time. The amount of content on the web is exploding to the point where nobody even knows what exists out there. Search is going to evolve into a discovery engine to get in front of users where they are spending time and solve their core needs day-in and day-out.

Eric Enge: So essentially, by leveraging what you learn about users across all your properties, you can do a better job of anticipating their next need.

Shashi Seth: Exactly. We have started doing a lot of that. Yahoo News has both the contextual slide shows that not only target the user and their interest, but also use search as the backend technology to generate those slide shows.

We also have contextual shortcuts which underline terms that are interesting for the user. They are shown appropriately on various content pages so that when people hover on it for three seconds they get a short-end search results page on top of the content page. If the user engages with it, that's good but if not it goes away.

We do something similar on many of our homepages with what we call trending now modules. It basically looks at the topic of a page and puts all the trending searches on top so that people can find all the trending topics in that space. These are several ways that we are starting to engage our users to bring them over to search and give them a great experience. If we can do that really well a couple of times, users will start thinking of us as the search destination to go to.

In the last two months, there was a slight uptick in our comScore numbers for the first time in 18 months. Then last month (April) the numbers shot up by 1% point, because the amount of activity we can generate from 600 million users is pretty large. That shows the power of our audience base and why tapping into that resource makes a lot of sense.

Eric Enge: 1% is a pretty significant move in this game.

Shashi Seth: An interesting aspect of market share reporting is that some people carve out context-driven search efforts as a different number than traditional searches. As long as the user engages with the experience intentionally and gets search results, we believe that how it is generated shouldn't matter.

Eric Enge: Going back to the notion of discovery and fulfilling that need. It's not as simple as going to a specific URL, typing in a query in a specific format and getting results. It seems like it doesn't have to be that standardized, that it could be much more distributed across various formats for interaction.

Shashi Seth: Exactly, and that's how we are going to be successful. Now, it's up to the industry to get together and decide what they count as searches across the board. Today what happens is comScore calls out these content-driven searches separately from people going to the search homepage and entering a query and hitting enter. While that is interesting, we don't think that is where the industry is headed. The industry is changing significantly and needs a different way to measure overall search that is equitable for all competitors.

Eric Enge: Can you speak to the presentation that you did for your Investor Day?

Shashi Seth: That presentation was largely focused on how we see the search industry changing, how we see our users changing, and how we think search results are going to change. The work is already underway. The underlying driver is that there is so much data out there that either doesn't exist on web pages altogether or it exists on web pages but is so deeply embedded that it is hard for anybody to extract and to assimilate it.

For example if someone was looking for which actors were in a certain movie, that is a fairly easy for search engines. It becomes harder to look for slightly more complex information such as the names of all the other actors that have worked with a certain actor. It becomes even slightly more difficult to find the name of the director that has directed an actor the most often and even more arduous to find which movies brought the most money and fame to a given person.

Eric Enge: Now, you are talking structured databases.

Shashi Seth: Exactly. This information is probably embedded in snippets over hundreds of thousands, or millions of documents. If somebody went to a search engine for that information, they could eventually find the answer, but people should not have to do that amount of work, given our short attention spans and limited time.

The onus is on search engines to extract this information and put it in their repository in a way that can be useful for users. This is going to be critically important, and is what we call the web of things. Another example is finding dishes or menu items in restaurants rather than looking for restaurants. Instead of looking for a Greek restaurant in Palo Alto, California, someone could look for any restaurant in Palo Alto, California that has mango cheesecake on their menu.

That starts changing how people search and the landscape of search completely. That's one big effort that we have underway and we launched this Menu Item Finder feature as one of the first efforts in that direction, but there is so much more that can be done.

We are also focusing on monetizing search differently in respect to rich ad inserts, search assist tabs, and so forth. These are really important features that advertisers are looking for, because at the end of the day when an advertiser is looking to do a buy, all they care about is an audience.

Those audiences can likely be found in many different places, and that is OK with advertisers as long as they can do the same demographic or psychographic targeting. We have been investing in this space for about a year and we have seen a lot of movement from advertisers.
For consumers, another new area of investment is centered on getting in front of users in a contextual manner, getting them at the right place at the right time and presenting them with experiences that fulfill their needs. The last six or seven slides walk through one use case that we are working on and planning to deploy, which is much more integrated than search experiences today.

Eric Enge: The Napa Valley Restaurants example?

Shashi Seth: Yes. People spend a great deal of time on email, their personal home page, and content properties like Finance and Sports. This behavior gives us a good sense of what interests them. By looking at their search history, their content engagement and similar information, it is possible to personalize and tailor experiences to them, which we do – while staying within our trusted privacy policy, of course.

For example, the today modules on the Yahoo! Home Page are targeted to our users; every user gets something different. Someone else's computer likely has different stories than mine would. We call that technology content optimization that personalizes the type of content displayed to a certain user.

The technology exists, so now we need to do a really good job of getting in front of those users and offering them something that interests them. If they engage with it and have a compelling experience like the Napa Valley example, they will want to come back and do it again.

Eric Enge: You could argue that you are providing the results for four different searches in the old-fashioned world. Reviews, menu directions, a way to share it, and putting that all into a single answer to the original question.

Shashi Seth: That brings up a good point of how to measure that. Should it be counted as one search or four searches? The world is changing and as we get better at providing answers to user's needs, the number of queries alone is never going to be a good enough measure of how good of a job someone is doing. One would actually argue the opposite. If a user's needs can be answered in one query, or without even them asking them a question, how is success measured?

Eric Enge: Maybe another way is to measure the average number of queries per session and if that goes down you are making progress.

Shashi Seth: Yes. User engagement or time spent on a search results page is another. A host of different measurements tell the story significantly better than just the number of queries being performed on a search engine.

Eric Enge: Is Yahoo continuing to invest in mobile search too?

Shashi Seth: Absolutely. We believe that the next frontier of search is definitely in the mobile space. We already do really well in that space with nearly a hundred partnerships with various carriers and OEMs around the world. In recent months we've picked two out of the three carriers in Canada as partners. There are countries like Indonesia where we have 80% penetration in the mobile search space. We've done an amazing job with it, and today our volume of mobile search is pretty high. In the next five years, mobile search has the opportunity to become larger than web search.

For us, mobile search is not about a search box where someone enters a query and gets an answer. We gave people a peek into the future by creating an app called Sketch-a-Search, which we launched on the iPhone.

Essentially the user never has to type a query and we don't even offer a keyboard in that scenario. It starts with a map and the user simply points out an area that interests them on the map. In San Francisco they might be looking for restaurants around near them. They simply draw a circle along the road and we find all the restaurants and provide ways to filter the results so they can find exactly what they are looking for. When they find it, we have the contact information, menu and if possible images and reviews, and they never have to type a query.

In the world of Smartphones, people are going to use apps as a proxy for search. They will look at the task at hand, and find an app that fits that need. It will become more vertical as people use it for shopping, local services, restaurants, points of interest, travel, music and so forth, which is quite different from web search. It is much more contextual and location driven.

Eric Enge: Despite the rage about how great mobile devices are, the reality is that the keyboard experience just isn't the same. People need to have options about discovering information. What do you leverage in the discovery process to personalize the user experience on web or mobile search?

Shashi Seth: We already look at their interests and their demographics for advertising, which is not much different from what is needed to do content targeting or personalization.

Over a period of time, we can determine what someone's interests are. If they have been looking for a car on Yahoo Search for a week and going to Yahoo Autos and interacting with different modules and content across the network related to automobiles, we have a fair sense that they are interested in researching or purchasing a car. While protecting these details and any personal information, we can target them both from an advertising perspective as well as a content perspective.

A lot of our content optimization and content targeting personalization technologies straddle those worlds really well, so we are able to get to the users and create experiences that make sense for them. It has to be done subtly so as not to be alarming to them. We have learned that art over the years, and have already deployed a good amount of this technology. Of course we are always improving and making it better.

When we run a test of personalized content and targeted content discovery versus non-targeted content discovery, the numbers speak for themselves. That is a large problem anyways that people like Amazon and others have to grapple with. That science is becoming better and better, and we are seeing the results get significantly better over the months. We have a lot of hope and a lot of excitement in that space.

Eric Enge: Thanks Shashi!

Shashi Seth: Thank you Eric!

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